Giovanni Pinna

Dr. Mr. Pinna,

I much regret that we couldn’t meet at the advisory board meeting in Paris,
where I could have expressed my personal and ICOM’s support in connection
with your nomination for the title „world president of the ICOM”.  I have
read with great interest your active world e-mail correspondence during last
months with a lot of interesting ideas. I tried to spread them all over the
country among ICOM members – as ICOM Hungarian chair.

Thank you very much for your kind invitation for the ICOM Italia
International Conference in the subject of disabled people and cultural
heritage on 28-29 November, 2003. It was especially a very great pleasure
for me because our museum in Hungary was among the first to develop its
services towards disabled people. A wheel-chair ramp was built at the
entrance of the museum about 20 years ago. Disabled people may enter  free
of charge into the museum. There has been a separate chamber exhibition for
blind people since 1993: they can get hold the objects and interpret them.
There are descriptions in Braille and we have also an English leaflet about
the museum also in Braille. Our institute has a valid cooperation agreement
with the world famous International Peto Institute (pontos neve: Peto András
Institute for Conductive Education of the Motor Disabled and Conductors
College – kell ennyire részletesen?) for more than 20 years, with the
Hungarian Association of Blind People and with other similar charity
organizations. There is also a study-room for deaf people where they can get
acquainted with the most important exhibitions of our museum in the course
of special demonstrations and by the help of sign-language interpreter
film-shooting.

We have a service especially for blind visitors  at the entrance of museum
from 1998, and this year also from the entrance of the exhibition units : a
map plotting board in Braille gives help to the visitors at the territory of
the museum of more than 60 hectar. An open air theatre „Skanzen-Amfiteátrum”
has been operated since 2002 in the museum which can be visited also by the
wheel-chair users by the help of a special infrastructure.

Dear Mr. Pinna, I hope these examples can prove that the Hungarian Open Air
Museum considers very important to convey its cultural heritage towards
disabled people. We maintain very characteristic and tragic but uplifting
photos, snapshots about our disabled fellows who understood the message of
our museum through the tools and communication used by us.

On the basis of the above – if you are interested in the topic – I am
pleased to take part at the conference with a presentation. If our results
could have been of interest to you, please do not hesitate to contact us.
You can get more information about our museum by the help of our web side:
www.skanzen.hu.

Hoping to hear from you soon, I remain

        with best wishes:
      Dr. Miklós Cseri director
      chairman of ICOM Hungary
***

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